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April 19, 2012

[Throughout
the border state of Punjab, whether in villages or cities, drugs have become a
scourge.Opiumis
prevalent, refined as heroin or other illegal substances. Schoolboys sometimes
eat small black balls of opium paste, with tea, before classes. Synthetic drugs
are popular among those too poor to afford heroin.]

Pargat Singh,
left, and a friend prepared to inject drugs in a derelict building in a village in Punjab, a state where

drugs have become a
scourge.

KAZIKOT VILLAGE, India — In this village not far from the Pakistani border, the
wheat harvest is only days away. Water buffaloes are resting in the shade.
Farmers are preparing their fields. And drug addicts like Pargat Singh are
crouched in the shadows, injecting themselves with cocktails of synthetic
drugs.

Last
Thursday, just after 11 a.m., Mr.
Singh followed another man into a dark corner of a decrepit building favored by
the roughly 50 addicts in this village. Cracked prescription bottles littered
the ground. The other man jabbed a syringe into his arm and injected a blend of
prescription drugs that delivers a six-hour high.

“Save some
for me,” said Mr. Singh, who isH.I.V.positive and stricken with
tuberculosis. He told a photographer: “Shoot my picture. Make me famous.”

Throughout
the border state of Punjab, whether in villages or cities, drugs have become a
scourge.Opiumis
prevalent, refined as heroin or other illegal substances. Schoolboys sometimes
eat small black balls of opium paste, with tea, before classes. Synthetic drugs
are popular among those too poor to afford heroin.

The scale
of the problem, if impossible to quantify precisely, is undeniably immense and
worrisome. India has one of the world’s youngest populations, a factor that
is expected to power future economic growth, yet Punjab is
already a reminder of the demographic risks of a glut of young people. An
overwhelming majority of addicts are between the ages of 15 and 35, according
to one study, with many of them unemployed and frustrated by unmet expectations.

For the Punjab
government, the problem is hardly unknown. Private drug treatment centers, some
run by quacks, have proliferated across the state, and treatment wards in
government hospitals have seen a surge in patients. Three years ago, a state
health official warned in a court affidavit that Punjab risked
losing a whole generation to drugs. Roughly 60 percent of all illicit drugs
confiscated in India are seized in Punjab.

Yet when Punjab held
state elections this year, the candidates rarely spoke aboutdrug abuse.
In fact, India’s Election Commission said that some political workers
were actually giving away drugs to try to buy votes. More than 110 pounds of
heroin and hundreds of thousands of bottles of bootleg liquor were seized in
raids. During the elections, party workers in some districts distributed
coupons that voters could redeem at pharmacies, activists said.

“We have
encountered the problem of liquor during elections in almost all states,” S. Y.
Quaraishi, India’s chief election commissioner, told reporters. “But drug
abuse is unique only to Punjab. This is really of concern.”

Punjab’s reluctance to treat the drug situation as a full-blown
crisis is partly because the state government itself is dependent on revenue
from alcohol sales. Roughly 8,000 government liquor stores operate in Punjab,
charging a tax on every bottle — an excise that represents one of the
government’s largest sources of revenue. India’s comptroller found that liquor consumption per person in Punjab rose
59 percent between 2005 and 2010.

“We are
promoting addiction in our state,” said Dr. Manjit Singh Randhawa, the city of Amritsar’s civil surgeon, a job akin to chief medical officer. “I’m
getting calls from people saying they have lost their children, they have lost
their breadwinners. In every village, people are falling prey to this drug
abuse.”

Ranvinder
Singh Sandhu, a sociologist in Amritsar, surveyed 600 drug addicts in rural and urban areas of Punjab and
found that they were usually young, poor and unemployed. He said that most
villages did not have health clinics but did have three or four drugstores,
which often made sizable profits selling pills and other synthetic drugs to
addicts who cannot afford heroin.

Mr. Sandhu
said he had completed his study six years ago, at the request of Punjab’s
governor, yet had never been contacted by any state official about the
findings. “The state is not conceiving it as a social problem,” he said. “They
are conceiving it as a personal problem.”

Opium has
a long history in Punjab, and was commonly and legally consumed here before India and Pakistan gained independence in 1947. Today, Punjab is a
primary gateway for opiates smuggled into India from Pakistan and Afghanistan. Opium is also grown legally in India for medicinal purposes, and some of the crop arrives in Punjab on the
black market.

The
problem is prevalent in middle-class enclaves, where some users are hooked on
heroin. One impoverished neighborhood of Amritsar, called Maqboolpura, is known as the Village
of Widows — because so many young men have died of drug abuse.

“Drugs are
available everywhere,” said Ajit Singh, who has spent 13 years running a school
for poor children affected by drug abuse. Of the school’s 656 students, roughly
70 percent have lost a parent to drugs. One girl, a fifth grader, lost five
uncles and her father to drug-related deaths.

In KazikotVillage, about a two-hour drive from Amritsar, a local nongovernmental organization tries to prevent the
spread of H.I.V. by regularly distributing clean syringes to addicts. The
group’s workers say there are 48 hard-core addicts in the village (out of more
than 2,000 people) but that many other people use drugs. Government officials
have sponsored “camps” here, with health officials providing antidrug
information or trying to persuade addicts to undergo treatment — neither of
which, villagers say, has been successful.

“Everybody
knows about it,” said Hira Singh, a local shopkeeper. “But nobody does anything
to stop it.”

Mr. Singh,
the H.I.V.-positive addict, lives at his parents’ home with his younger brother
and his sister. He started using drugs at age 15, and then quit school. He
worked for several years pulling a rickshaw, got married and had a daughter.
Later, his wife gave premature birth to twin sons, who died. Unable to abide
her husband’s drug use, his wife left him and their daughter, Harpreet, 3.

“He steals
things from the house,” said Seema Kaur, his sister. “Sometimes, he steals
money.”

Mr. Singh,
now 29, said he had tried many times to quit using drugs, but the urge was too
strong. Because of his tuberculosis, he said, he is careful not to get to close
to his daughter. “I play with her from a distance,” he said. “I try not to hug
her, so that she doesn’t get infected.”

He added:
“My future is finished. I am basically dead now.”

Hari Kumar contributed reporting from Kazikot Village, and
Nikhila Gill from New
Delhi.

It is indeed very painful to read about the problem of drug
abuse in Punjab. In the past, while serving in Indian Armed Forces I
took pride in the fact of our men who are not tempted to use drugs in
spite of easy availability. Things seem to have changed. The problem is
that of a sense of dissatisfaction about the living experience. Man is a
creature of his emotions and lives to find happiness by satisfying his
desires and cravings. The gratification of desires produces satisfaction
and provides contentment. It is not easy to experience contentment
unless the desire to seek gratification is restrained. Sensual pleasures
give a moment of happiness and the mind demands more of the same and
its demand becomes an obsession affecting all other physical and mental
activities. If contentment is understood like a bar whose level could be
adjusted, man could set this bar at a high,
moderate, or low levels to experience contentment by gratification of
his desires. If I set the bar of contentment at a low level, I am easily
satisfied with my living experience and the minimum that I would desire
is the satisfaction of my hunger and thirst.

In Army Service, I spent
several months in training camps where the satisfaction of life involved
eating a simple meal of dal, roti, and drinking tea. Desires are
operated by sense organs and sense organs are controlled by the mind,
and the mind is controlled by the intellect and the intellect could be
controlled by what I name as the 'Knowing-Self' which establishes man as
a moral and spiritual being. Man has to learn about his real or true
nature and discover his 'Knowing-Self which could control his intellect,
mind, sense organs, and his desires.